The Storyteller

by Jodi Picoult

To me, it seemed they were following an abridged version of Judaism, so who were they to tell me how and what to believe? I said this to my parents when I was lobbying to not have a bat mitzvah. My father got very quiet. The reason it’s important to believe in something, he said, is because you can.

“Even the most beautiful things can be toxic. Monkshood, lily of the valley—they’re both in the Monet garden you like so much at the top of the Holy Stairs, but I wouldn’t go near them if I weren’t wearing gloves.”

Foreshadowing

“When I got here, to America, this is when my life began,” my grandmother says. “Everything before… well, that happened to a different person.”

Repentance might bring peace to the killer, but what about the ones who’ve been killed? I may not consider myself a Jew, but do I still have responsibility to the relatives of mine who were religious, and who were murdered for it?

Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.

For just a moment, when Josef let his own death mask slip, I could see the man he used to be: the one buried beneath the kindly exterior for so many decades, like a root growing slow beneath pavement, still capable of cracking concrete.

“It is amazing, what you can make yourself believe, when you have to,” Josef says. “If you keep telling yourself you are a certain kind of person, eventually you will become that person.

With each word that passes my lips, I feel less heavy. It is as if I am giving him sentences made of stones, and the more I relay, the more of the burden he is carrying.

“You don’t make peace only with God. You make it with people. Sin isn’t global. It’s personal. If you do wrong to someone, the only way to fix that is to go to that same person and do right by him. Which is why murder, to a Jew, is unforgivable.”

“Basia?” I whispered. “How did you convince the chairman?” “Just like you told me.” A tear slipped down her cheek to land on the sheets between us. “I got down on my knees.”

Service him sexually

I had not thought about this, but it was true. There was no black and white. Someone who had been good her entire life could, in fact, do something evil. Ania was just as capable of committing murder, under the right circumstances, as any monster.

In the four months I had worked for the Hauptscharführer, he had never laid a hand on me. Now, he did. He cupped his hand around my cheek, so gently that it brought tears to my eyes. His thumb stroked my skin the way one would touch a lover, and he met my gaze. Then he hit me so hard that he broke my jaw.

He punished her harshly to prevent his brother from hurting her worse

I remember my grandfather as a soft-spoken man who loved books. His fingers were always stained with ink from receipts he would write customers at his antiquarian bookstore. “You met in Sweden,” I say, which is the story we had all been told. She nods. “After I recovered from typhus, I went there. We survivors could travel anywhere in Europe, then, for free. I went with some other women to a boardinghouse in Stockholm, and every day, I ate breakfast in a restaurant, just because I could. He was a soldier on leave. He said he had never seen a girl eat so many pancakes in his life.” A smile creases her face. “He came every day to that restaurant and sat next to me at the counter until I agreed to let him take me out to dinner.”

I learned new facts: I researched how Minka could have traveled and lived in Sweden so soon after the end of the war. Starting in the final months of the war, Sweden, in conjunction with the initiative of the Swedish Red Cross and Count Folke Bernadotte, organized the "White Buses" operation. They brought about 30,000 Holocaust survivors to Sweden and offered them medical care and assistance in finding a new home in Sweden or abroad. This is documented at Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and the Swedish Red Cross. Allied military forces transported many survivors as a humanitarian effort to get them to safety or to relocate. Bernadotte’s memoir, "The Fall of the Curtain" (1945), offers a firsthand account of the White Buses mission. Historians such as Sune Persson, author of "The White Buses: Rescue Operations during the Holocaust" (2002), have written extensively on the operation, analyzing its logistics, negotiations, and impact.

But if you seek forgiveness, doesn’t that automatically mean you cannot be a monster? By definition, doesn’t that desperation make you human again?

against me. I’ve never felt like this about a woman: like I need to consume her. Think of baseball, I tell myself, but I know nothing of value about baseball. So I start silently listing the justices of the Supreme Court, just so that I don’t scare her off by moving too fast.

list justices of the supreme court--funny!

“What if I tell you that I won’t wear the wire unless you come back to bed?” “That’s blackmail.” Sage is beaming. She shrugs. It’s easy to say you will do what’s right and shun what’s wrong, but when you get close enough to any given situation, you realize that there is no black or white. There are gradations of gray. I hesitate. But only for a second. Then I grab Sage around the waist and lift her off her feet. “The things I do for my country,” I say.

First, I had baked the croissants, their bitter almond filling masking the taste of the rat poison I’d mixed in. I left them outside the door where the guard stood, keeping watch over Aleks until tomorrow morning.

poison the guard

Sometimes, there’s this expression on his face, as if he cannot quite believe he got so lucky. I’m not sure what he’s seeing when he looks at me, but I want to be that girl.